BOOKS

A year ago my darling 11-year-old dachshund Bentley got very ill and I had to let him go. The empty space he left behind was like a giant canvas with only a dot on it – baffling and overwhelming. Finding joy became as challenging as making sense of abstract art.

We’ve all heard it, perhaps made the judgement ourselves, “A child could do it.” I admit I have. Works like Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, Jackson Pollock’s Number 28 or Quebec Granite Line by Richard Long, are an enigma to me.
But that’s just it.

Not knowing anything about the painter or her work, I decided to set my expectations aside and spend the next 30 minutes getting familiar with the painting through slow looking, a technique I first heard about at an Ottawa Art Gallery writing workshop and later read about in Peter Clothier’s book Slow Looking: The Art of Looking at Art.